World of Warcraft’s Burning Crusade emulator shut down by Blizzard cease-and-desist

As they have no legal legs on which to stand, MMORPG emulator projects operate on the hope that they’re under the radar enough that the actual owner of the intellectual property won’t notice or care that such activities are transpiring. Unfortunately for operator Gummy and his team over at Burning Crusade, Blizzard wasn’t about to let this fly on its watch.

Burning Crusade’s owner said that he wasn’t able to move the project to another country but doesn’t regret the time he put into it: “It makes me happy, and programming makes me happy. Of course, I am sad that things didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped but I don’t think I’d change any of the decisions I made […] This project gave the last four years of my life a sense of purpose that I thoroughly enjoyed. ”

Word of advice. If you’re going to do a private WoW server, keep it low-key and set up servers outside of NA/EU/Asia jurisdictions. I do feel for these people. They want a more basic and less convoluted version of the game they love and Blizzard is telling them ‘they don’t want it’. When someone puts in the work to make it happen, they squash it. It’s within Blizzard’s rights, but it’s also hypocritical.

They’re not leeches. They had a game they loved and over time it changed dramatically. They’ve all paid the money for the game as well. Of course what is being done is outside the law, but I do respect those that take matters into their own hands. If, like many claim, the monthly subs are only to keep servers going, (which seems suspect to me) then I see no issue with it. Either way, I’m not going to demonize a bunch of people that just want to play the game they love that isn’t provided anymore. What I don’t understand is people calling them names and being so angry at them.

Speaking purely for myself here, I’m perfectly okay with it. Blizzard have been asked time and again to provide classic servers, have refused, and so they’ve pretty much left it open for others to step in and profit from it. You can debate the legality of it all you like, but at the end of the day, if people want to play vanilla WoW, they will do. If Blizzard choose not to profit from it, more fool them.

Why on earth would a business create a product that directly competes with their own product? That’s what would happen here. I think it has less to do with Blizzard caring and more to do with the fact that they know it’ll hurt current WoW (and also give them another thing to needlessly support). I don’t blame Blizzard for this and as someone who doesn’t care enough about WoW to really have an opinion on the content, this doesn’t bother me outside of the fact that it sucks the guy wasted so much time.

You have already asserted Mark “The Other Internet Warlord” Kern’s Twit quote as the “truth” without evidence or citation. As he has produced no numbers or documentation to back up his claim.

Nor have you explained in any compelling and convincing way why it is that Mr. Oleg has “absolutely zero understanding of how the legal profession works.” So begging the question then, how does it work? I presume this is your field of expertise?

Edit: Not sure why this comment was edited as it was critical of why my questions and concerns where not being properly addressed by Dreema. I don’t believe it was in any violation of the code of conduct here. But I guess hey, whatever. :(

Why you are trying to derail conversation? If you are self proclaimed expert, enlighten us with your knowledge and tell us how writing a letter is such expensive matter?

And since Im pretty sure you have zero understanding how making a server works, I’ll tell you. It takes years of daily work of experienced team to do all the scripting. And Blizzard will have to do same work as private server developers since they now dont have original code. Then they’ll have to spend money on hardware for new servers and hire GMs to support them. So yeah, it might very well take several millions dollars to launch legacy servers.

The small amount of $ that would go into launching classic servers is not a concern for multi-billion dollar company like Blizzard.
They could put up classic servers last year with a skeleton Dev/GM/QA/CS crew and it would barely affect anything else going on in the company. All the content already exists.
The only foreseeable outcome from that scenario would be a bunch of happy players.

On the one hand, I agree. Not liking the law doesn’t allow you to break. On the other, I hate what Blizzard and WoW have become and refuse to give them my money. So I choose not be an idiot but not play. If they put up an official vanilla sever, I’d re-sign up immediately.

Gummy is a good developer, but he clearly lacks common sense. He was completely focused on launching inside NA because he believed “nothing would happened”. He didn’t realize the hype nor the size of his own project.

The wowservers reddit is a mess as of right now, and i’m laughing hard about all of this circus.

What I really got from this article is the fact that draenei dental anatomy makes no sense. Their canines are too far apart and they have way too many incisors. They also lack any lower canine teeth, which means they can’t bite off meat efficiently, especially with their huge number of incisors and the weird placement of upper canines. While at the same time the latter are well developed for non-orcish humanoids and their molars seem to be too few and far behind other teeth for a proper herbivore.

Blizzard should wise up, and take note that there is a demand for this. Due to their changes people can no longer play a game they loved. They need to offer these classics servers, and just charge for them. This is them NOT making money they could. Idiots.

They already commented on this saying that it would be too much effort to recreate vanilla and they think its not worth it. Maybe they are right since majority of those who play private servers would never play it charged subscription money

I love how everyone is suddenly a business expert when this topic comes up.

From an ACTUALLY professional standpoint, ignoring a line of business with demand only happens when you’re either stupid or so rich you don’t care. Any middle-level company would have jumped on this. Example: DBG.

ignoring a line of business with demand only happens when you’re either stupid or so rich you don’t care.

The “but it was profitable” fairy tale only exists on this site not in the real world, at least for public companies. A billion dollar business with 10M a year in profit would hurt Blizzard and its stock price. Very frequently profitable products are not funded in a public company because they are not profitable enough. And sometimes very profitable/worthwhile products are not funded because there is a limited resource – e.g. people or money – that is even better.

“…or so rich you don’t care. “
==
Exactly.
I’m not a lawyer and don’t pretend to be one, but I do know that a business will never turn down a LOT of money, although many will turn down a little bit of money if they don’t think it’s worth their time and effort.

The only time I see Blizzard opening up time-locked or classic servers is when the main game of WoW begins to falter badly. They still have millions of satisfied players with the game so there isn’t any incentive to split that up.

Right now that’s what DBG has a problem with; they open a time locked/classic server then everyone jumps to it, then a few weeks/months later, its dead and everyone goes back to the MAIN servers where they have their main characters and plays that.

When millions start saying they want a classic server and the numbers dwindle on the main servers, that’s when Blizzard will consider it but just because 3000+ people crashed an emulator isn’t enough for Blizzard to take seriously regarding opening up and maintaining new ones.

You have no idea what you’re talking about if you’re not inside. That’s it. You admit it and then act like you know what is happening behind the scenes.

All we know is that private servers for legacy WoW pop up constantly and are swatted down by the company who won’t provide the same.

At a certain point this simply becomes ethical and if Blizz wants to eliminate the ability for people to play older versions they become ethically (not legally nor morally) obliged to provide the same when they take such away. So far, they have been taking away and not giving.

If there is ANY company that can actually afford to lose a little cash on eliminating bad PR, it is Blizzard. For Blizzard the argument that it “costs too much” is absolutely crazy when they can afford to scrap five years of dev to totally change a whole game into the next big thing.

If Blizzard did legacy servers they’d be like everything else Blizzard does: They’d be the best ever without compare.

The folks running EQ don’t have a choice. They don’t have many other ventures to open out and make money so they have to open up those types of servers to make a few bucks. I’m playing on Fallen Gate right now but I don’t pay anything because of my Lifetime DCUO sub.

Blizzard doesn’t have anything like that because they don’t need it. They have so many future projects lined up that makes probably tenfold more than what a ‘classic WoW’ server would make so for them it’s ‘why bother chasing nickels when we can chase dollars”?

Would you call the police if someone stole your car, or took your personal property? Same thing, WoW is Blizzards IP and they have every right to keep thieves from profiting from it. Even if they don’t charge a subscription and just ask for donations to keep the servers running they are still profiting from Blizzards IP.

A court of law will tell you it is no different except that when someone steals your IP they can leech millions. Ask Mod/Cheat company Bossland what it is like to lose 8.5 million dollars to Blizzard. Blizzard can legally do that to any idiot that reverse engineers any of their games.

A dude known as Gummy (who was also part of Arena-Tournament project – leet server purely for WoW arenas) some years ago announced Burning-Crusade project. Purely Blizz-like, with pre-nerf ultra challenging raids, no pay to win, godly scripting and so on. He gathered devoted following that praised him for all the years while he was working on it pretty much full time (dude has some bad sickness, so scripting this server was all he did basically).
His fans were so active hyping the server that Gummy TBC (unofficial server’s name) became one of the most anticipated. Even after Warmane launched its TBC servers that are of very high quality. Gummyboyz assured that Warmane is trash and cant hold a candle to the pure awesomeness and nerdgasm that Gummy TBC will be.

There still were doubts. Like when he said that he is going to host servers in US. “Blizzard already shut down Nostalrius, dont you think they will handle you also? Especially after you decided its a smart idea to name it: http://burning-crusade.com and host it in America” – doubters asked. Gummy was optimistic. He was sure that since he wont ask for donations, since his server wont be so popular, and since he is such a nice guy, Blizzard wont mind. Maybe even hire him some day. Aint this cute?

Gummy was so sure all will be fine, that fans believed him (or at least thought he has a plan in case Blizzard tries to mess with him) and waited for Gummy TBC laughing at everyone who plays other servers.

When Gummy TBC that now is known as Felmyst reached open beta, fans been spamming reddit and WoW forums hyping Felmyst and calling everyone to join the best server ever. So what you think has happened on the launch day? Right. Hello 3000+ queue and constant crashes. After 20th crash, server just went offline permanently. The next day everyone saw a post from Gummy where he said he recieved a letter from Blizzard that asked him to be a good boy and to never launch this pirate server. Which Gummy happily oblidged. Thus ends the story of server that was more then 4 years in active development, and was shut less then 2 hours after release.

This reminds me of a guerilla party my friends where throwing in a secluded forested area of a park some years ago, to which they decided to post about it unwisely online (as opposed to doing via word of mouth like all the other years). When they showed to set up, they where met with a large contingency of police officers, saying, “We read you are going to throw a party here. Unfortunately we can’t allow that.” Sometimes it doesn’t pay to advertise questionable stuff via the internets. Just saying.

I for one now finally believe Blizzard will never do vanilla servers and its just down to the simple fact that world of warcraft is not the game we originally loved and blizzard would be very embarrassed if a vanilla server was more popular than the legion server.

But without a doubt they would pull in enough money to support the servers and a small development team the demand is there.

To be honest Legion was the biggest over hyped pile of st****** **** they have released so far, the game has just been awful since wrath and steadily getting worse.

I cant see myself ever going back unless its to play vanilla and that includes at least 40 people I know personally who all say the same.

I for one now finally believe Blizzard will never do vanilla servers and its just down to the simple fact that world of warcraft is not the game we originally loved and blizzard would be very embarrassed if a vanilla server was more popular than the legion server.

This is the truth. They’re worried that their previous product was better and they want very much want you to play WoW so you can grind gold to buy Hearthstone packs.

WoW is now a microtransaction hub.You grind WoW gold for Overwatch boxes.

I played WOW since 2004, played all the popular private servers including Nostalrius, Elysium, Warmane, now playing Project Ascension. And I still think that WoW grew better with every expansion and now in Legion (which is widely considered to be one of the best expansions) WoW is better then it ever was. Thinking that WoW was better in vanilla or in TBC is speaking through nostalgy glasses. Maybe sense of community was stronger and leveling was harder, but pretty much everything from visuals to combat and content was crap compared to modern WoW

You see, that’s just your personal opinion. My personal opinion is that I think old WoW was light years ahead of current WoW. The massive drop in subscriber figures in recent years would kind of indicate more people feel my way than yours. I also have to wonder why, if you think the current game is way better now than the old one, you’ve played on so many popular private servers?

And if you’re going to claim that WoD was better than vanilla, TBC and Wrath… well, you’ve got one hell of a struggle on your hands there.

Subs drop indicates nothing. WoW is a very old game and it has subs model. When we have TONs of quality MMOs that are free to play. The fact that they manage to still hold millions subs with such fierce competition only speaks in Blizzard’s and WoW’s favor.

As for WoD. It was a good expansion (WoW didnt have bad ones). With quality of content, storytelling and dungeons/raids that are miles above those in vanilla or TBC. WoD’s problem was not the quality, but content drought after launch.

As for WoD, that’s your opinion. It was more much more than the drought. I have played EQ for years, content droughts don’t bother me. I didn’t care as much about them gating flying but I was not a fan of Garrisons. WoD made Dungeons feel like they were irrelevant after they did away with Valor and Justice points: there was no reason to do them after getting your drops. Making Mythics an inflexible 20 person raid sucked for guilds after being used to Flex Raiding. So yeah, there are arguments that can be made that it was NOT a good expansion.

WoD was not a good expansion and no where did Oleg say it was, but legion is a great expansion, every bit as good as TBC and Wrath (which i played) in my opinion. Yes the game has changed, some things for the better, some for the worse but so have gamers – most no longer have the desire or patience to spend months constantly grinding through beaten content until the next expansion comes out when they can go somewhere and play a new shiny game in the interim. Yeah, WoW has massive drops in sub figures and they get a ton of them back with a new expansion for a few months and still make a shitton of money.

Server communities had already gone to shit in Wrath. General was nothing but a trollfest on most servers. Barrens chat…yeah, don’t need to say beyond that. TBC was the last expansion i remember people being halfway civil to each other.

Yeah, but RPPVP is kind of a specialized subset that draws a specific crowd, one that i feel is not entirely accurately representative of the entire community due to it’s ruleset – a lot of PVEr’s tend to stay from both RP and PVP servers. However, in my experience in multiple games that support those server sets, I have always found RPer’s to generally be nicer to other players than people on normal PVE or PVP servers.

Oh yeah, for sure. RP servers tend to have nicer and more mature communities in my experience and that’s why I always roll on one if it exists. And I enjoy PVP servers as I think it add some excitement, I’m not much of a PVPer but I enjoy the threat of PVP while I’m PVEing heh. This again is also better on RP servers imo.

Businesses can lose trademarks if they don’t take action against infringement. If MMOs want to allow emulators without endangering their trademarks, they need to come up with a licensing framework (which costs them money to hammer out and monitor). It gets even thornier if the MMO is licensing from a third party, and doesn’t itself own the rights to the trademarks it’s using.

Granting licenses to emulators would have some bonuses from a community engagement perspective, and what is and isn’t popular can inform future design decisions, but that has to be weighed against the fact that they’re giving away a replica of your work for free. That’s a hard sell for the suits, even if the developers are into the idea.

The situation feels like the big bad picking on the little guy, but the company gets painted into a corner by people using their work without permission, and the complications of granting permissions.

There are dead games I’d love to play again, but that’s water under the bridge. Better to distill what you loved about those games and create something with the same flavor but original assets and stories. It won’t be the same… but nothing ever is.

If these emulator communities stopped flocking to a select few gigantic servers with thousands of players; and instead had hundreds of small servers with just a couple hundred players each, Blizzard would never bother them.

Hey, don’t shoot the messenger: that’s the only way it’s going to work. In fact there are tons of WoW emulators out there that have been running for years because they’re doing exactly that: a couple hundred players keeping a low profile, in a community where literally everyone knows each other. Gigantic emulator servers are easy targets.

Not the first case nor the last, people have passion, how many hobby zelda games out there? i saw some people recreate their favorite zelda game in 3D (Link to The Past was 2D), the problem start when they want to share more than screenshots and videos.

Hobbies are pretty much by definition doing something you enjoy simply for the point of enjoying them, not necessarily about the income potential. Why do people explore abandoned buildings knowing they’re going to get kicked out? Why do kids drink or smoke under age knowing they’re going to get arrested? Humans chase what they enjoy.

LOL never played a legacy server, have you? “Dead after a year anyway” really? Elysium server has nearly 8500 players at THIS MOMENT on a workday. (FWICT that’s more than the wow servers have on currently; I believe WoW servers are individually capped smaller however)

I don’t remember if it was Smith or Bastiat that pointed out that if a demand was strong enough it would ALWAYS go around legal restrictions and ultimately create a black market. Prohibition proved it, private servers prove it.

There’s a demand. It’s an ongoing demand, despite C&Ds. Many people – myself included – would cheerfully pay a Blizzard sub fee to play official vanilla servers. Many people DO pay Sony (or whoever the fuck runs it) to play EQ progression servers. Economic sense would say any company would logically prefer to make more money for nearly no effort, but Blizzard has other ideas.

Arguing about whether you think they’re fun or not is as stupid and subjective as arguing over whether orange is better than blue.

These pages have gone around and around so many times on this topic. It just feels silly. Many people would love legacy servers, even if you don’t care about them. It has nothing to do with “need” and a lot more to do with just wanting these kinds of news bits to not be a thing anymore.

At the end of the day, it really is a matter of saying, “Just let people enjoy things they enjoy.”

You are right that we’ve gone through this topic over and over, so I won’t say much. I just think anyone they have working on WoW needs to be 100% focused on maintaining the content schedule that they have been following with this expansion and carry it forward into the next.

I would be cool with their “Classic games” team to get around to giving WoW some love. They probably have their hands full with StarCraft Remastered and the Diablo II Remaster that everyone expects to come next.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, good to hear. I wish Blizzard would make their own Vanilla/TB servers, but the just because they don’t or are slow with it doesn’t give anyone the right to make private servers.

Am I the only one who finds it incredibly ironic that the text “the game started to become more public” links back to your own article about the emulator?

Because, you know, you literally had a hand in making it more public…

I’m sure it also didn’t help that this Gummy person actually used the domain name “burning-crusade.com”. Really man?

I did check it out though and it was incredibly polished, though it also reminded me how much the gameplay of WoW has progressed since then. It literally took me 10 minutes to kill wolves in the first human quest…. It was easily the best emulator MMO I’ve ever logged into.